Abstract

This paper adopts a qualitative approach to describing and analysing party ideological and policy alignments towards EU integration. The focus is on three conservative parties which share broadly similar topographical locations on the centre-right in their respective countries. The cases of the Conservative party in the UK, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire in France and Prawo i Sprawiedliwość in Poland are compared here, using a range of sources internal and external to the parties. While ideology and policy do not exist in a vacuum, but in constant interplay with a broad range of institutional and contextual factors, these other variables are largely bracketed out for present purposes in order to concentrate on the ideological and policy dimensions in their own right. In this meso-level analysis the focus is on the relationship between core ideological values, ideologically coloured understandings of national and international environments, general posture towards EU integration, and positions on specific institutions, processes or policies. It is argued that the degree of variation between the parties revealed even at this intermediate level of detail is a useful counterbalance to the inevitably reductive categorisations and generalisations drawn in macro-level comparative studies.